Boston suspect's father says he's a true angel'

By ARSEN MOLLAYEV, Associated Press

Friday, April 19, 2013

MAKHACHKALA, Russia (AP) — The father of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing described his fugitive son as a smart and accomplished “angel” in an anguished interview in which he claimed they were set up.

Anzor Tsarnaev spoke with The Associated Press by telephone in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan after police said one of his sons, 26-year-old Tamerlan, had been killed in a shootout and the other, Dzhokhar, was being intensely pursued.

“My son is a true angel,” said the elder Tsarnaev . He said his son was “an intelligent boy” who was studying medicine.

“We expected him to come on holidays here,” he said.

“They were set up, they were set up!” he exclaimed. “I saw it on television; they killed my older son Tamerlan.”

The AP reached Tsarnaev through a phone number provided by a relative in the United States.

The younger Tsarnaev gave few clues as to his inner life on his profile on Vkontakte, a Russian equivalent of Facebook, though he did include websites about Islam among his favorites.

The family’s origins are in Chechnya, the mostly Muslim Russian republic where separatist rebels fought two full-scale wars with Russian forces since 1994.

A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader said the family left Chechnya long ago and went to Central Asia, then moved to Dagestan, a Muslim republic adjacent to Chechnya that has been the site of a sporadic insurgency for more than a decade.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev attended School No. 1 in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan. The principal’s secretary at School No. 1, Irina Bandurina, told the AP that Tsarnaev left for the U.S. in March 2002.